Adventures in Onionism

Taken near South of the [NC/SC] Border on my drive to Florida. Man, that is one boring drive.

You know how all my races take photos of everyone and then you can buy expensive prints of them after, like at theme parks or roller coasters? Well, economics conferences do the same thing. Except the prints are free. Woo! NEUDC 2013! I cut my hair since then, FYI.

I read Nina Munk's recent book The Idealist to possibly add it to my Development course syllabus. It's about Jeff Sachs (he of The End of Poverty fame) and his Millennium Villages Project. Basically, Sachs is an idealist, he insults you if you disagree with him, and his program doesn't work and isn't being rigorously evaluated since there was no control group. I usually want to cut Sachs some slack, maybe because I think I'm already too cynical so I shouldn't bother wasting energy criticizing his (naive) optimism, and I tend to agree with his statement that the amount of money we're talking about for his desired big push of foreign aid is pennies compared to our military spending. But the book really portrays him as a bully. (And also possibly a washed up bully since his fame seems to have waned of late.) Anyway, I'm clearly not a fan of MVP. The book itself was alright, if not stunning: B, maybe a B-. Listen to this:

For my development course.

Took George to the Schuykill dog park in Philly. Happy Thanksgiving.

Steve's brother has a luxury box at FedEx Field, so I was offered a free invite to the Skins-Niners MNF game, including pre-game on-field access. As a Skins fan the game was a stinker (L, 27-6) but the night was awesome. However, given the recent spate of horrible news from the NFL, and the dumb Washington fan who was mad at everyone else on the train because nobody liked hockey as much as he did, I have to agree with Mark Kleinman , Matthew Yglesias, and others: taxes on alcohol should be much higher.

1. Never buy an inflatable camping air mattress. If I've advised you to do so in the past (Ashley), I apologize, because I was wrong. Leaks are inevitable. If your trip is long, you'll get used to the cold hard ground and sleep well on just the Gossamer Gear Night Light , torso length. If it's a short trip, you're probably not hiking that far. So suck it up and just carry a bunch of foam pads. I've got two Night Lights, a Ridgerest and a Z-Lite: put them all together, and you're much more comfortable than when you bring your stupid EMS Air Channel , which will leak. From the seams, not because you punctured it. 2. Here's my hotel for the night before the race. An easy half mile from the road, had it all to myself, and it's only 5 miles or so from the race start. Just north of the AT's crossing of I-70.   Free awesome stuff in the shelter. (Sorry about the glare--it's flavored pipe tobacco, which I can only assume is awful.) 3. I ran...

Delivered today, just in time for JFK 50 on Saturday. Running 50 miles with no training in brand new crazy shoes. What could go wrong? 152 job apps in.

That was kind of fun. Not too bad for having run further than five miles only twice in the last 2.5 months, and only 100 miles of "training." Hope I recover for JFK 50 in six days.

What I do (when not running ultra-marathons) is featured in Wired magazine. My academic grandfather (adviser's adviser) and postdoctoral supervisor is the lead figure in the article.

has improved dramatically since I learned to use Google Scholar's Cite-->Import into BibTex-->Copy-->BibDesk-->Publication menu-->New Publication from Clipboard. It'll change your life, I swear.

10 Easy Races Use Ken Train's code for mixed logit discrete choice models to estimate the willingness to pay for chlorine in western Kenya. Apply to a couple hundred jobs.

Headed to Boston for NEUDC and meetings. This airport burrito was a huge disappointment.

George, gf, and I took a quick trip to the AT. George got cold, so he dressed up like Yoda, or maybe E.T. The leaves were pretty.

The Hardrock 100 lottery opens today. This past summer I saw a guy in the Telluride grocery store with a ULA pack on, who looked like a long-distance backpacker. I said "You look like a thru-hiker, but you're not anywhere near the CT or CDT." It was these guys , who were thru-hiking all 58 Colorado 14ers, which had never been done before. Looks like they were successful, so good for them.

Because I like computer stuff like this, and because "51% likelihood of being foreign" doesn't really seem like probable cause to me, I figured out how to encrypt e-mails with PGP (wiki explanation). My public key is here . If you're interested, you can set it up quite easily on a Mac with GPGTools . h/t MrB

Walmart lets you sleep in your RV or car in their parking lots. I've taken advantage of this a time or two, and I've read that Clarence Thomas does the same. The NYT magazine has a photo piece on people from Arizona Walmart lots.

As you can see below I sold my Subaru for scrap, because it would have cost too much to get it to pass PA inspection. I may or may not turn that cash into 13% of a used Suzuki V-Strom 650, or maybe just a Burly trailer so I can get George places. For the time being, I'll just be renting on occasion, because it's pretty ridiculous to own a car when you live half a mile from your office. Apparently the College eliminated a lot of low-fee retirement investment options. This is unfortunate. I may not believe all of what my father taught me as a child anymore, but "put your retirement investments in a low-fee index fund and leave your money there, because you'll lose a bunch of money in taxes and fees if you try and beat the market" is something I am still 100% on board with. Watch this PBS Frontline, or listen to this NPR Fresh Air if you don't know what I'm talking about. I got my first solo-authored journal submission rejection yesterday. A revise and ...

I saw John Prine live at the Wilmington, DE Grand Opera House last night. I went by myself, and I was probably the youngest person in the audience. That said, it was amazing . I cried. I only learned he was playing nearby (I'm equidistant from Philly and Wilmington, plus there's a cheap beer store across the state line in Delaware) from his appearance on Colbert on Thursday, which I thought was only mediocre, but made me want to see him before he got any older. I had previously never heard the two songs below. This afternoon on the way home from my run, I realized I had no way to pay for my standard two veggie burritos, because my wallet had been ransacked. I accidentally left it in the car overnight, and accidentally left the car unlocked. $36 and three bank/credit cards gone. Thanks for leaving my driver's license. If you'd left me $13 for burritos, I wouldn't even be mad. Thus far Swarthmore Police are great and doing even more than I expected (hoping to...

I probably won't get around to doing a full write of my Colorado trip, but here are the photos . Briefly: I drove to Colorado and stopped in Salida for a day or two of running in low, BLM-y type hills. I tried to drive to Lake City, but I got sidetracked by rolling my SUV. So I was stuck in Gunnison for a weekend. I bought a crappy Subaru and finally got to Lake City. I half stayed at the hostel there and half car camped, while doing four 14ers in one day and meeting some very cool CT and CDT hikers. I drove around to Silverton, but stopped at George and Elisa's goat farm in Montrose for a night. In Silverton, I car camped, and again hung out with the CT hikers. I ran part of the Hardrock 100 course, and George got into a porcupine, so we had to go to Durango to sort that out. After Silverton I stopped in Ouray and ran more of the Hardrock course, then went to Telluride to run more of the Hardrock course, hang out with Hawkeye, and watch a Johnny Cash coverband. From Tellurid...

Nano just told me about PTL, or La Petite Trotte à Léon, an "enlarged Tour du Mont Blanc." A new-ish race that's part of the UTMB set of races, PTL is 300 km long, 24,000 meters of vertical, must be done in 2 or 3 person teams (simultaneously, not tag-team), 136 hour cutoff, only 3 aid stations, and goes over 30+ passes/summits. Apparently it's a lot off-trail too. My friend Lint did it the last two years; he DNF'd in 2011, and hallucinated-but-finished in 2012. I'd love to, but as with the rest of UTMB, it's the last week in August, which is a problem with many universities. I guess I just have to get a job at a school on the quarter system. [ race official site ] [ participant pre-race report, with link to google earth of the course ] [ participant after action report ]

Also, Honda made a tiny 250cc bike and some old guy is riding it across the country and writing about it for the NYT. Quite good if you like motorcycles/the road/adventure.Part 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 The Suzuki V-Strom I checked out a while back is still for sale, according to the website .

Some wonderful popular pieces about econ lately. This American Life on maybe just giving poor people cash instead of training/cows/whatever. Jacob Goldstein , reporter for above story, in the NYT.  Blattman , professor interviewed for the above, grad school peer of mine, discussing the same, and the broader idea that not running the experiment is the crazy/immoral thing to do. Stiglitz in the NYT on inequality and the 50th anniversary of the march on Washington. He describes the Chicago school of free-market economics thus: "unemployment (if it existed) was the fault of workers." I distinctly remember the moment in Advanced Macroeconomics as an undergrad where the professor said essentially the same (that there is no such thing as involuntary unemployment). I thought it was stupid at the time, and I still do.

Fun times.

Nano says we beat Scott Jurek's split for the section on which I paced him.

I'm not sure I have any desire to run the Leadville 100 , as it seems like a lot of road, but I had a blast pacing my good buddy Nano from mile 73-86. I emulated Gazelle's pacing at States, by which I mean I actually pushed him. ("It's going to hurt tomorrow regardless, let's move." "Start running again." "You can hike faster than this.") We crushed that section, passing two or three dozen people, and he finished in 24:24, earning the ridiculous pie plate-sized sub-25 hour buckle. Congrats to Nano, and I hope he pushes me the same way at Hardrock next year (fingers crossed for the lottery). Yesterday I started my Nolan's 14 recon by doing a Mt. Massive traverse, then driving past Twin Lakes to the La Plata trailhead and bagging that. The parts took 4.5 and then 3.5 hours, with a total of 9,000 feet of climbing. Fun! (I've already done Elbert, plus it's a veritable sea of humanity, if you're wondering why I skipped it.) ...

Ugh. With your bearded shaggy haired ultra runners. So cliche.

Do you really need this sign every 20 yards on main street?

I'm in Ouray now, and the hubbub in this coffee/chocolate shop is killing me. In terms of views from downtown, I'd have to say Ouray>Silverton>Lake City, but in terms of places I'd actually want to spend any time the order is exactly reversed. Lake City>Silverton>Ouray. In Lake City, hikers roll into town, and it's immediately Locals plus hikers versus Texans. The tourists do their ATV thing, but the kids also play volleyball and frisbee in the park. In Silverton, the park is on the far edge of town, and empty. The locals are cool, but the people most willing to hang out with hiker trash are themselves ski-bums instead of true locals.  The Texans don't even spend the night, they just take the narrow gauge railroad up from Durango, crowd the sidewalks during the day, then leave on the last train. The jeep road out of town has more mines and less free car camping than that out of Lake City. Outside Ouray as far as I could tell it's totally private and ...

After I picked up George from the vet, I went to a brewpub my brother recommended (Carvers) and ran into Kittens and Moonbeam, who had just finished the CT, and were angling for the free brown ale that they give out to CT finishers. George was groggy from anesthesia. I camped up Maggie Gulch outside Silverton, and bagged Handies this morning, which is the 14er that's on the Hardrock course. (I also did into and out of Silverton in both directions over the past few days--the race is a loop that switches direction every year--one of those runs led to the porcupines.) I did a little bit more of the course on jeep roads after Handies, but they were full of jeeps, so it wasn't much fun. I'll probably spend a day near Ouray, and one near Telluride, next.

I wish Colorado would stop trying to kill me and my dog. Awesome 15 mile run on the Hardrock 100 course turned shitty after George got a mouthful of porcupine. Thing is, it was the second one we saw! I was in front for the first and almost stepped on it myself, but kept George away. Then a couple miles later it was getting dark and I lost the trail at the river crossing. While looking for it, George found the second porcupine. Dammit. UPDATE: The car wouldn't start this morning. I drained the battery using headlights to pull quills. Everything was frozen to boot. A jump solved that, and now George is at the vet in Durango waiting for his appointment. They said it didn't look as bad as many cases they've seen. And they're open for regular business, so no emergency fee. All should be well.

I just posted a few dozen photos from the trip so far. Here they are on Picasa .

As the Hard Rock photo demonstrates, I'm in Silverton now. I left Lake City, spent a night at new friends' new goat farm outside Montrose, and drove in yesterday. I submitted our WASH B pilot paper to the Northeast Universities Development Consortium Conference ( NEUDC ), so now I need to go running.

I did four 14ers yesterday. I started at 7AM with Lucky (Lake City hostel owner, who hiked part of the CDT in '07, met a girl (now his wife) in Lake City, and has spent six and half years of zero days here ever since) and a friend of his. We took the winter route up the south side of Sunshine Peak, traversed to Redcloud, then George and I went off on a different ridge to bag two more by ourselves. The ridge was sketchy in parts, with quite crumbly bad rock. George was not too confident on it, even though he's more stable on it than I am when it comes down to it. Weather came in, so I bailed off the ridge a drainage earlier than would be optimal. I thought the day was done then, but during the gnarly bushwhack down Copper Gulch, the weather cleared, so I kept going. I did a long roadwalk up to the Wetterhorn trailhead, left George tied up below the summit, which requires serious class 4 (low 5?) climbing, then we took the trail around to Uncompahgre, and bagged that probably aro...

Enjoying Lake City. A couple people remember me from the CDT, one's the RD for an ultra, so he's seeing if anyone is doing any cool runs this week. In the meantime, yesterday I went east and ran in the La Garita Wilderness. Bushwhacked down a drainage, saw a live moose and a dead elk. This morning I ran west from HWY 149 on the CDT/CT towards the San Juans. It's just a high plateau, but it's got great views of the Matterhorn, which, if not too technical, I will try this week. I'd share pictures, but I think I forgot to pack the appropriately sized USB cord for the camera, or my SD card reader, so it'll have to wait. Also, I totaled my 4Runner. I took a turn on a gravel county road (the Doyleville cutoff) too fast, went into the ditch, and rolled 3/4 of a revolution. George and I weren't obviously hurt. I scratched my wrist, and after the adrenaline wore off, my left ankle hurt. The only person to drive by did so in a monster truck, and he had a flatbed t...

Just arrived in Lake City. Gunnison was nice, but I wasn't there by choice. I'll explain in a future post for non-fb-friend readers. Lake City was one of my favorite trail towns on the CDT, so let's see if I can relive the magic.

Does this still work? I haven't posted via SMS in a while. Drinking beer in a windy but free BLM campsite on the Arkansas River outside Salida. Ran a great 12 miles, made significant research progress at the library. Life is good.

The weather is so much better. So is the running. Lake City, Silverton, and Leadville are all on the list, maybe more. I just need to find a coffee shop that will let George inside, or a hostel that will let him in the bunk room, and then I'll be all set.

This is my office thermostat. So I'm driving to Colorado. I just bought a cooler at the Wal-Mart on the "Avenue of Mid-America" in Effingham, Illinois. I can't believe it's another 1000 miles to the Rockies.